Abstract

These two workshops will introduce participants to the basics of how to analyse texts quantitatively, such as open-ended student evaluations or survey responses. The first workshop will cover the basics of text analysis in R, including the philosophical ideas that lie behind quantitative text analysis, how to read text data into R, and how to prepare texts for analysis using document-term matrices. The second workshop will explore how to describe texts quantitatively using word frequencies, wordclouds, TF-IDF weighting and other plots. It will go on to explain methods of dictionary analysis to understand the ideas being expressed in texts and will briefly introduce classification methods for text.

Note: Participants should have background knowledge of coding in R.

Speaker

Dr Tom O'Grady (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University College London)

Tom O’Grady is a political scientist who uses quantitative methods to understand the opinions, behaviour and ideologies of citizens and politicians. His research has focused in particular on using 'big data', including computational text analysis and large-scale aggregation of public opinion surveys across time and space. He also has research and teaching expertise in the use of experimental, quasi-experimental and survey methods in the social sciences.

Workshop Recordings & Resources*

*All the materials below are made available to CUHK staff only, and shared through OneDrive.

Part 1: 01 February 2024 (Thursday)

[ View Recording ] [ Resource Pack ]

Part 2: 02 February 2024 (Friday)

[ View Recording ] [ Resource Pack ]